


Be Careful, With Me

by sdwolfpup



Category: due South
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-21
Updated: 2006-11-21
Packaged: 2018-11-06 23:14:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11046357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sdwolfpup/pseuds/sdwolfpup
Summary: Ray’s life takes shape.





	Be Careful, With Me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for vecchiofest! Many thanks to pipsqueaky and laurashapiro for beta’ing, double for Laura, who looked through multiple drafts. :) Section titles are from Patti Griffin’s “Be Careful.”

_Be careful where you bend me_

Ray’s relationship with Angie was a bell curve. They’d started out so slow, hanging out together in a group of friends or running into each other at a local coffee shop and talking for a few minutes about family. He hadn’t even known Ange was interested in him until he got a parking ticket when he was out on a first date with Jeanie Manelli. He’d stood there and watched Angie’s pen scratching furiously on the pad, saw wisps of dark hair coming loose from her ponytail, and hadn’t tried to charm – or argue – his way out of the ticket. He and Jeanie had had a nice time after that, but all he left her with was a kiss on the cheek and then he’d never called her back.

Instead he’d called Ange the next day and asked if he couldn’t pay off the ticket with dinner, certain she hadn’t actually filed it. She’d agreed and they made plans for that night at a local place, low-key and romantic in a subdued way. Ray had thought it went well until he got the notification to pay the ticket the next day. He’s pretty sure that’s when he started to fall in love with her.

She wouldn’t see him again until he paid the ticket, but after that they were exclusive. He brought her home to meet his family, officially, though she already knew his sister Maria. She baked him a cake for his twenty-sixth birthday that tasted a lot sweeter on her lips. And when he took her to the movies the night of their proposal, he’d given her money to put in the meter and grinned to himself when he heard the click and her startled scream. He’d greased a lot of palms and called in a bunch of favors to get the little note that read, “Will you marry me?” into that meter. Lorenzo told him later that a different couple had gotten to the meter before Ray and Ange had pulled up, and that the guy would be explaining himself the rest of the night.

Ray wasn’t sure when the best part of their relationship was, the apex of their curve, but he suspected it was that moment at the meter, when being married was still an ideal, and neither of them knew how much it hurt to bend all the time. They never agreed on anything after that, not entirely, and their life together became a series of compromises, where neither one was ever really satisfied. He would bow with the wind of her needs, and then she’d twist under the force of his own. Her shoulders hunched when they argued, his back ached as he lay in bed at night, and they grew apart like two young trees. The slide down was slow at first, impossible to see while they were in it. But Ray wasn’t surprised when they first talked about separating, and then divorce. When he got the last of the luggage out of the Riv and hauled it back into his mother’s house, straightening himself before he walked through the door, he’d felt like a wave had deposited him on shore. A few steps, and it was over.

 

_Be careful where you send me_

Ray’s relationship with Irene was a semi-parabola. He’d learned a couple of things in eighth grade geometry: one was what to call all those shapes you saw, like a semi-parabola or an ellipse, and the other was that Irene Zuko had beautiful legs. He’d known Irene for a long time, but he hadn’t wanted anything to do with her. His pop kept pushing for him to get in with Frankie, be buddies, get close to the family and so Ray had just done the bare minimum of socializing to keep Pop off his back. And then he’d dropped his pencil in geometry class one day and had leaned down to get it just as Irene was walking up the aisle in some skirt that Ray would never let his nieces wear now. His introduction to Irene’s legs made it hard to concentrate after that, and he got very clumsy with his pencils that year.

Irene didn’t notice him until he started playing JV basketball, and it was like a switch had been flipped on and now Ray was standing in the light. He started going over to Frankie’s house more often, trying to catch sight of Irene while Frank held court over his buddies.

Ray got to touch Irene’s beautiful legs in tenth grade, accidentally, when she was walking by him in English class. He dreamed about her all the time after that. He fell in love with her the day he got to Frankie’s house early one Saturday before a game, and she’d unexpectedly opened the door and stood there smiling at him. “Ray,” she’d said, and her voice had been all warmth and expectation and he’d been cemented to the spot, unable to move or speak or think, even. He just nodded his head to say yes, yes I’m Ray, and you’re Irene and we’re meant to be together forever. Her smile never faltered when he didn’t say anything or move at all, just got bigger and more beautiful, until she took his hand and pulled him inside. Everything after that was a rush.  
  
He’d still come over to see Frankie, but he would exchange stupid grins with Irene through the doorway of Frank’s room, and although they never did anything where Frankie or the neighborhood could see them, she was the focus of his life through high school. They both dated other people, went to movies and dinners and dances with other kids in school, but Ray spent most of those nights after his dates climbing up the trellis to get to Irene’s room, which was always the right temperature and smelled like girly perfume and, best of all, had Irene there, waiting for him.

Ray would have thought their semi-parabola was zooming upward, but looking back on it, it was a headlong slide into disaster. They were in love, but never enough to do anything about it, and when Irene left for college, Ray sent his heart with her. He got it back in a letter months later saying she was seeing someone, that he should be seeing other people, too, that they both knew that loving each other just wasn’t enough and it was better this way and she was probably being silly, that he’d already gotten over her. Ray thought she _was_ being silly, because he never got over her, he just moved on. Even when she came back to town and their slide down together finished for good.

 

_Careful how you end me_

Ray’s relationship with Fraser was a straight line, rocketing off from the starting point like they’d known each other forever. The problem with straight lines, Ray realized when he had a bag on his desk and a phone at his ear, was how abruptly they ended.

There were a lot of ways to say goodbye to someone, but over the phone without actually saying goodbye was probably the worst, even when it couldn’t be done any other way. That was why he’d sent the postcard, hoping that Fraser would understand what Ray’s words couldn’t say. He packed his bag and hung up the phone and made his way to the airport like everything in his life depended on him getting there as fast as humanly possible. He suspected it did; there was a great, gaping chasm at the end of this line, and if he paused now, for even a moment, he’d stop moving entirely.

The feds met him at the airport, searched through his luggage and took away most of the mementos that he’d packed from his desk, the ones he’d carelessly wrapped in his socks and underwear. The only ones they left were the ones they didn’t search hard enough to find, like he’d planned it. The plane ride from Chicago to Vegas was four hours. Just enough time to get drunk, if he hadn’t needed to stay sober. Instead he thought about geometry. He thought about Angie and her dark, sad eyes the day they’d settled on who got the car and who got the house; he thought about Irene’s blood on his hands, on his shirt, in his heart; and he thought about Fraser arriving in Chicago alone, having to find his way on his own again and not knowing why.

Ray figured it was good that the Bookman didn’t have anyone close to him. That way he wouldn’t have to warn anyone to stay away, wouldn’t have to expand the shape of his life. Because the other thing he remembered from geometry was that a point on its own was infinite, and it never had to end. 


End file.
